Providing environmental awareness for vehicle safety, particularly in autonomous driving, has been a primary concern for automobile manufacturers and related service providers. For example, having data on where vulnerable road users (VRUs) (e.g., pedestrians, other non-vehicular road users/objects, etc.) are in a road network can potentially enable autonomous and/or other vehicles to take actions to decrease the potential for collisions with VRUs, thereby increasing road safety. However, mapping VRUs over a wide geographic area has historically been resource-intensive. Accordingly, service providers face significant technical challenges to more efficiently detect and map VRUs on road segments or links of digital maps (e.g., geographic databases).